After Meta announced it was ditching fact checkers, Alex Schultz, the company's chief marketing officer, said in an interview with Business Insider on Tuesday that the election of Donald Trump as president influenced the decision.
"Look, we're going to adjust to any administration and we always do and that, I think, is appropriate," Schultz said at CES 2025 in Las Vegas on Tuesday, adding, "We've worked with the Biden administration through its term. We'll work with the Trump administration through its term. Elections have consequences."
Earlier on Tuesday, Meta announced it would stop using third-party fact-checkers in favor of user-generated community notes.
The company also said it was moving some of its content moderation teams from California, which typically votes Democratic, to Texas, which typically votes Republican. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the move would "help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content."
Schultz added that in addition to the incoming administration playing a role, the timing of the decision was also influenced by a shift in "the vibes in America."
Schultz said there's a change in how Americans broadly view censorship, free speech, and content moderation, which he said was signaled by the results of the election.
"It's a big, big shift," he said. "So I think, yeah, we're responding to that at this time because that's the logical time to do it."
Zuckerberg said the new community notes feature would be similar to the one used on Elon Musk's X, formerly Twitter, which allows users to add notes to posts that potentially contain misinformation or are missing context.
Schultz told BI the announced changes also bring Zuckerberg "back to the core of what he cares about."
"I think fundamentally he's been pushed into a place that was further than he wanted to be in terms of censorship and in content moderation," Schultz said, adding Zuckerberg was "taking advantage of the moment to do what he thinks is right."
Meta's content moderation policies have been scrutinized for years. Four years ago, Facebook banned President Donald Trump from the platform for policy violations, sparking the ire of Republicans, who have accused the site of silencing conservative views.
Schultz said he thought those complaints of bias were fair and that Meta could not find fact-checking organizations on the political right at the same rate as left-leaning ones. He said community notes on X have been more successful at getting people from across the political spectrum to contribute.
However, he said Meta will take a different approach than X when it comes to relations with the brands that advertise on their platform.
"We're not going out there denigrating our advertisers and putting them in terrible positions," he said, alluding to critical comments Musk has made about some of X's advertisers. X sued a group of advertisers in August, accusing them of antitrust violations.
Schultz said Facebook would maintain its brand safety tools that allow companies some control over the kinds of content their ads appear next to.
He also said the primary concerns for their big advertisers are around hate speech and adult nudity, rather than content addressed by fact-checkers, and that the brand safety tools will remain focused on those areas.
"We're going to focus on precision and not be taking down things we shouldn't be taking down," he said.
